ABSTRACT
A certain view of Jonathan Swift has been powerfully represented in Middleton Murry's shocked denunciation: Nevertheless, it is not his direct obsession with ordure which is the chief cause of the nausea he arouses. According to this view, Swift is not only obsessed and perverted but professedly inimical to womankind. The women who achieved acquaintance with Swift discovered not only the celebrated author but also an oddly domestic individual. The presence of Swift the satirist encourages the release of female energies in utterance. Swift was an influence on women writers who had never met him. Swift had distinguished himself in finding an immediate and quite unheroic voice, a critical grumbling impish voice that emerges not from the centre of authoritative power but from somewhere on the sidelines. To summarize the views of Swift generally held by women writers of the eighteenth century, one can say that for them he was the exciting poet of limitation.
